Tag Archives: liability

The arrest and court appearance of a man accused of the rape and murder of Melbourne ABC staffer Jill Meagher has sparked a spate of commentary on social media – much of it potentially prejudicial to the suspect’s upcoming trial. Here is an excerpt from my new book – Blogging and Tweeting Without Getting Sued: A global guide to the law for anyone writing online(Allen & Unwin, 2012) – explaining the basic principles of sub judice contempt for lay users of social media. See also Julie Posetti’s innovative and useful Storify on this.

Victoria Police are also struggling to cope with prejudicial comments about the accused on their Facebook site. See my earlier blog on similar problems with the Queensland Police Facebook page where they have faced similar challenges trying to moderate prejudicial comments.

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Sub judice – time to brush up on your Latin

The most frustrating area of contempt law for the traditional media has been sub judice contempt – publishing prejudicial material that might reduce the chance of a fair trial. First Amendment rights in the US have given the media immunity in recent times, but ‘trial by media’ can prompt a mistrial and lawyers can be disciplined if they make prejudicial statements during a trial. ‘Sub judice’ comes from the Latin meaning ‘under justice’ and has been prosecuted most often in the UK and Commonwealth countries, although some European countries like Denmark have laws against publications that might seriously damage a trial.

In 2011, the judge presiding over the trial of a conservative politician for a false expenses claim in Britain referred to the Attorney-General a potentially prejudicial tweet about the case by a rival politician. High-profile Labour peer Lord Sugar tweeted to his 300,000 followers on the second day of the trial: “Lord Taylor, Tory Peer in court on expenses fiddle. Wonder if he will get off in comparison to Labour MPs who were sent to jail?” The Telegraph quoted Justice Saunders saying: “I was concerned that if seen by a juror it might influence their approach to the case… I reported the matter to the Attorney-General not for the purpose of taking any action against Lord Sugar but to investigate whether entries on Twitter sites … posed a risk of prejudicing the fairness of a trial, and if so whether there were steps which could be taken to minimise that risk.”

International media law firm Taylor Wessing revealed in 2011 that they had defend a website against contempt allegations over prejudicial user-generated posts on a message board just a few weeks before a criminal fraud trial. They had to take down the messages and the jury had to be warned not to do Internet research. They pointed out that bloggers and social media users were liable for their publications even when they did not intend to damage a trial. From the moment someone has been arrested in a criminal case, reports about the matter are seriously limited in many countries. Authorities can prosecute for this kind of contempt if there is a ‘substantial risk’ that justice will be prejudiced in the case.

While the mainstream media are the most common targets of such actions, the size of the audience for many blogs and social media commentators will increasingly make them vulnerable. The Victorian Government Solicitor’s Office advises websites to take down materials related to an upcoming case in the lead-up to a trial. The most sensitive material is anything implying the guilt or innocence of the accused, confessions, photo identification of the accused, and republishing reports of earlier hearings. A public interest defence might be available for publication of material on a matter of overwhelming public importance, but you should never rely upon this defence without legal advice.

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Blogging and Tweeting Without Getting Sued: A global guide to the law for anyone writing online is now available in print and ebook formats worldwide.

Disclaimer: While I write about media law and ethics, nothing here should be construed as legal advice. I am an academic, not a lawyer. My only advice is that you consult a lawyer before taking any legal risks.

The courts have long held that anyone having direct responsibility for a publication is legally liable for it, so if your blog or comment is on the website or social media site of another organisation, both you as the writer and whoever is hosting your work can be sued for defamation. (Some jurisdictions – most notably the US – offer strong defences to the hosts of third party comments.)

If someone edits or moderates your work before it is published, they too share the burden of legal liability. That happened recently to the News Limited website Perthnow, when it was ordered to pay $12,000 compensation to a West Australian mother over racist comments posted about her deceased teenage sons. The comments had been approved by a moderator.

If anyone republishes your work, through syndication or perhaps even through retweeting or forwarding your defamatory material, they also are also liable. Even someone who inserts a hyperlink to libellous material can be sued for defamation in some places, although the Supreme Court of Canada rejected this position in a landmark decision last year.

Plaintiffs will sue the writer, editor or host organisation for a range of reasons. Sometimes they just want to gag the discussion, so they issue a defamation writ to chill the criticism. This is known as a ‘SLAPP’ writ – ‘Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation’ – and in some countries they are simply thrown out of court as an affront to free expression. Others allow them. Plaintiffs often want to get the highest possible damages award from someone who can afford to pay it, so they might bypass the original impoverished blogger and sue the wealthier company that republished the material. Sometimes they enjoin all of them in their action, although this adds to their legal costs if they lose.

As the Australian High Court ruled in the Gutnick case in 2002, publication happens whenever and wherever someone downloads it. If you have published something defamatory about someone who is unknown in your own state or country you are probably safe from suit or prosecution until you travel to the place where they do have a reputation.

They would have to prove they could be identified from the material you posted. Of course, if you have named somebody they are identifiable, but what if you stop short of naming them but use other identifiers? For example, what if your blog questioned the ability of ‘a prominent 21st Avenue cosmetic surgeon responsible for the fat lips and lopsided breasts of at least three Oscar winners’? You would be much better taking legal advice first and actually naming the surgeon if you have a solid defence available to you. Why? Because there might well be other surgeons who meet this description, and you would have a hard time defending a suit from them if you didn’t even know they existed.

If your description is broad enough you will normally be reasonably safe. So if you had made your description fairly general – ‘an LA cosmetic surgeon’ – the group would be too large for any single surgeon to be able to prove you were talking about them. (They say there are almost as many cosmetic surgeons as lawyers in LA!)

Of course, if you decide after taking legal advice to actually name someone you need to ensure you use enough identifiers to ensure they will not be mistaken for someone else. That’s why court reports in the news usually state the full name, suburb, occupation and age of the accused person. Otherwise someone by the same name might show their reputation was damaged by proving their friends and colleagues thought they were the rapist, murderer or drug dealer you were writing about.

Your legal responsibility might even extend to pressing the ‘Like’ button on Facebook, as courts struggle with the legal status of this symbol – even in the US. See some useful analysis of this here.

See journlaw.com’s DEFAMATION update page for a range of recent defamation cases, many of which have involved social media.

Disclaimer: While I write about media law and ethics, nothing here should be construed as legal advice. I am an academic, not a lawyer. My only advice is that you consult a lawyer before taking any legal risks.

Time warps on the Internet. It is one of the most important aspects of new media, and one of the most complicating in legal terms. On the one hand, pressing the ‘Send’ or ‘Publish” button makes your work instant and irretrievable. While the newspaper publisher could always pulp an offensive edition before the trucks left the factory, as a blogger or micro-blogger you have to live with the consequences of your digital publishing errors. Yes, you can remove your blog, tweet or Facebook status within seconds of posting it, and request that it be taken down from search engines. But you can never be sure someone hasn’t captured, downloaded, and forwarded it in the meantime.

This permanent quality of new media does not mix well with an online writer’s impulsiveness, carelessness or substance abuse. There is an old saying: ‘Doctors bury their mistakes. Lawyers jail theirs. But journalists publish theirs for all the world to see’. That can be applied to anyone writing online today. At least in bygone times these mistakes would gradually fade from memory. While they might linger in the yellowing editions of newspapers in library archives, it would take a keen researcher to find them several years later. Now your offensive or erroneous writing is only a Google search away for anyone motivated to look.

British actor Stephen Fry learned this in 2010 when he tweeted his two million followers, insulting Telegraph journalist Milo Yiannopoulos over a critical column. “Fry quickly deleted the tweet once others started to latch on to it, but as we know that rarely helps when you’ve posted something injudicious online: the Internet remembers,” Yiannopoulos wrote.

This new permanence of stored material also creates problems for digital archives – because if the material remains on the publisher’s servers it may be considered ‘republished’ each time it is downloaded, as lawyer Steven Price has blogged. This means that even where there might be some statutory time limitation on lawsuits, the clock starts ticking again with each download so you do not get to take advantage of the time limit until you have removed the material from your site. The best policy is to take all steps to withdraw any dubious material as soon as possible. If others choose to forward or republish it, it has hopefully become their problem rather than yours.

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Blogging and Tweeting Without Getting Sued: A global guide to the law for anyone writing online is now available in print format in Australia and New Zealand (UK release in July and US release in October) and as an ebook via Kindle, Google, Kobo and some other providers. [Order details here.]

Disclaimer: While I write about media law and ethics, nothing here should be construed as legal advice. I am an academic, not a lawyer. My only advice is that you consult a lawyer before taking any legal risks.

“Most bloggers cherish their independence, but this comes at a price. If you are the sole publisher of your material, then prosecutors and litigants will come looking for you personally. If you write for a larger organisation you share that responsibility with your employer or client. A litigant can still sue you as the writer, but they might choose to target your wealthier publisher – particularly if you are an impoverished freelancing blogger.

“In the 20th century, large media organisations would usually pay the legal costs and damages awards against their journalists if they were sued and give them the services of their in-house counsel to guide them through any civil or criminal actions. Most of the so-called ‘legacy media’ still do that today, so if you are a mainstream reporter or columnist thinking of going solo with your blog you might weigh this up first. Another advantage of writing for a large media group is that your work will be checked by editors with some legal knowledge and perhaps even vetted by the company’s lawyers before being published. Either way, you might investigate insuring yourself against civil damages, although even in countries where this is available premiums are rising with each new Internet lawsuit. Another option is to scout for liability insurance policies offered by authors’ and bloggers’ associations. Search to check your options.”

The issue has come into sharp focus with journalists’ own tweeting under their personal handles in recent times. My recent piece in The Australian, reproduced below, looked at the question of journalists’ standards of independence and fairness on Twitter compared with the expectations placed upon them in their ‘day jobs’.

Organisations have started to develop social media policies for their reporters’ and social media editors’ use. But a huge grey area is the question of personal liability for individuals.

If a journalist (or any other employee, for that matter) claims in their Twitter profile that the views expressed are private not those of their employer (a standard disclaimer) where does that place them if someone sues them personally over their tweets?

It would take a particularly generous proprietor to cover the legal expenses of their employee who has distanced their private comments so clearly from their work role. It would likely leave them high and dry, with their own house and savings on the line, defending a legal action over a tweet, blog or other posting.

Despite my long experience as a journalist and academic, I made a serious error in this very story commissioned by The Australian. It was only noticed by an astute sub-editor (copy editor) at the eleventh hour – saving the newspaper and myself significant embarrassment at the very least. Thank God for subs!

But the fact is that our private blogs and tweets do not have the expert eye of a copy editor scanning them pre-publication – which can leave us personally liable for our words.

That’s something worth pondering very carefully before we press that ‘Send’ button.

THERE was a virtual sideshow alley to the circus of Rupert Murdoch’s appearance at the Leveson media inquiry in London – coverage of the event on Twitter.
The topic #rupertmurdoch trended briefly at 7th place worldwide on the social media network, remarkable given discussion was also running at #leveson, #NOTW and #hacking.
It augurs well for a future for journalism that the appearance of an important public figure at a judicial inquiry could hold its own in the Twittersphere with the rapper 2 Chainz, a reality program on teenage pregnancy and the hashtag #APictureOfMeWhenIWas.
The Twitter feed offered a warts-and-all view of the medium as a source of information and informed opinion on news and current affairs.
It also raises issues of relevance to the self-regulation of journalists’ ethical behaviour when democratic governments are proposing statutory media controls in the converged environment.
Frequent Twitter users are accustomed to the extremities of opinion expressed in 140 characters on controversial issues.
The very “social” nature of the medium means that the streaming commentary is not dissimilar to what you would hear from a crowd gathered around a pub television watching a major sports event or a breaking news event.
You get a smorgasbord of views, quips, snide remarks, venom, puns, one-liners and references to a whole lot more, often in the form of links or photos.
With retweets you can then get the “Chinese whispers” effect, as facts are massaged or adapted to fit the character count down the grapevine.
Journalists are supposed to offer audiences some meaning in the midst of this mess.
For journalism and media organisations to stand out from the crowd they need to be the source of reliable, verified and concise information and opinion based on proven facts – something we used to call “truth”.
This week’s coverage of the Murdoch appearance demonstrated that some prominent journalists seem to have formed the view that Twitter is so different a medium that they have licence to ignore some of the foundation stones of their ethical codes.
Murdoch’s appearance elicited a blood sports style of sarcasm from critics from rival organisations, most notably at the ABC and Crikey.
Crikey’s Stephen Mayne might argue that readers would expect his Twitter feed to reflect his years of confronting Murdoch at News Corporation annual general meetings. Fair enough.
But does that excuse his tweet suggesting counsel assisting Leveson ask Murdoch about his marriages and fidelity “to test whether he really agrees that proprietors deserve extra scrutiny”?
Surely it was that kind of tabloid privacy intrusion that prompted the whole sorry saga. Which was Mayne’s point, I guess, in “an eye for an eye” kind of way.
Of course, News Limited journalists are not ethical saints in their use of Twitter, but on this issue they were in defensive mode.
Many prominent News columnists do not have active Twitter accounts, but even The Australian’s Media team chose not to engage on this important international media issue.
The Daily Telegraph’s Joe Hildebrand showed that, in the Twittersphere, sarcasm is often the preferred line of defence: “Can’t wait until Rupert Murdoch resumes speaking at the Leveson inquiry. I haven’t known what to write for 10 minutes.”
News journalists can hardly look to their boss for leadership in seeking to be unbiased in their Twitter commentary.
Murdoch himself posted to his @rupertmurdoch handle on March 30: “Proof you can’t trust anything in Australian Fairfax papers, unless you are just another crazy.”
Amid the snipes and counterattacks there is a whole lot of banter too – journalists doing the virtual equivalent of talking in the pub after work.
It might be gratifying, clubby and intellectually stimulating, but is a very public media space the place to be doing it?
What message does this send the audiences who follow these journalists on Twitter because of their connection to their respective masthead?
Most offer the standard “views expressed here are my own” rider on their Twitter profiles.
But is that really enough, when beside that they trumpet their journalistic position and employer organisation?
It is symptomatic of a broader problem of corporate social media risk exposure that has triggered an industry of social media policy writing, in the wake of the harsh lessons for McDonald’s and Qantas when hostile customers converted their promotional hashtags to #bashtags in public relations disasters.
But in journalism it’s more complex, because reporters are encouraged to use social media for establishing and maintaining contacts, sourcing stories and engaging with their audiences.
Journalism should be all about transparency, so many would argue it does no harm for readers to know what a reporter really thinks about an issue, particularly in a converged postmodern world where objectivity is supposedly dead.
It might well be, but the ethical codes still speak of fairness, accuracy and respect for the rights of others.
And those very codes are meant to be followed by journalists and their organisations in their mainstream reporting.
Sadly, they might soon face a statutory tribunal and penalties for their unethical actions.
They can’t have it both ways. News organisations cannot sell themselves to readers as impartial, authoritative sources of news and informed commentary when on Twitter their journalists are either breaking their codes or staying mute about an important international news event involving their boss.
The citizenry deserves better if we are to rebuild its confidence in journalism as an important democratic institution.

Disclaimer: While I write about media law and ethics, nothing here should be construed as legal advice. I am an academic, not a lawyer. My only advice is that you consult a lawyer before taking any legal risks.